Texas (6 page)

‘“You got me,” he said, throwing his gun away and coming out into the open. They shot him bit by bit. It wasn't a clean death. They shot his other arm, then through his ribs. They came closer and put the finishing touch on him right in the forehead. They cut off one of his arms and took it back to town to show they got him.'

Irish wheezed a little. His eyes flicked over her and then focused on something she couldn't see from where she was sitting.

Texas ‘Fellas come up here, they don't know anything,' he said as he took out the tin of sweets from his top pocket.

‘The policeman must have felt terrible letting him go in the first place,' she said.

Irish didn't answer and then he was pulling himself up out of his chair. The flyscreen door scraped closed behind him. She didn't know whether he was just tired of talking or if it was something she said. She sat back in her chair and drank the last of the tea. She knew the world where she came from was small, a world where similar ideas and opinions found and fed one another. There was little difference from the talk at home on the farm, to the conversations in the boarding school common room and among the people she met as a journalist for a rural newspaper. Some of her friends had travelled to Europe. When they returned they married boys from brother schools who had either waited at home or travelled in packs of their own. She was told she needed to travel to appreciate where she came from. Irish's story was from a long time ago but it made her think of other stories, stories she didn't know that were connected to the place where she grew up. She thought of her family's farm and imagined for the first time how the country might have looked before the chain was dragged through it. Before it was shaped and sowed. She remembered the Aboriginal people on the outskirts of town, their camps conveniently cornered into areas of little value to the town's municipal leaders. It made her uneasy to think that while she was growing up they had lived in the swamp lands, the sinkholes of the country. Her eyes focused again on the view through the louvre windows. The heat mirage on the flat turned the dirt into liquid. But she couldn't afford to think like that, to doubt her family's right to belong in that place, otherwise there was nothing to hold on to.

V

They were fighting. Rational thoughts seemed to compress, one on top of the other, to become something else, something blinding and fierce. It felt like she was capable of anything but it never lasted and then she was left with nothing. John had his back to her. But he wasn't finished.

‘You always, you and your parents, try to make me feel as though I'm not good enough.'

She wasn't going to remind him that her mother had been dead for three years and she hadn't spoken to her father since they left. He turned around to face her. ‘I'm sick of it. I'm not having it any more.'

She'd been telling him about Irish. How he'd come back after lunch for his supplies and told her that he was going to go like the old blackfellas; when he knew it was time, he was going to walk into the bush. She'd added to John that hopefully they wouldn't still be around to see that. She didn't realise her husband would be so easy to provoke.

‘I'm making a go of it here. For us, for the boys. Plenty of space for them. What more could you want?'

Texas ‘What more could
I
want?' she repeated slowly and quietly. ‘Someone to talk to, that would be a start.'

She was trying to find in her that place where once there was fearlessness. So that she could continue. To tell him that she wasn't putting up with this any longer. But she'd lost the ability to hold on to the fight, to pluck words and hurl them back without any thought of damage.

‘What's the matter with you? Aren't you happy?'

Their eyes met. She looked away. He had no idea how she felt and it made her think there was nowhere to go. How could she even start to tell him what was wrong when he hadn't even noticed? Blinking away the tears that made everything seem like a mirage. He turned and walked out the door. There was so much space, she thought, so much space for them all to get lost in. She let the air out of her lungs slowly, it could be worse, perhaps. And she thought of her mother.

The cool air between the house and the kitchen was fragrant with frangipani. She stepped from one concrete paver to the next, the thought crossing her mind that a long-legged man must have laid them. Inside the kitchen she opened the windows, letting in the industrious sounds of the birds, and tore down the net curtains from above the louvres. Broken webs drifted with dust motes, sliding across the light. Falling, spiralling. She thought of Irish's desire to walk into the bush and die; the moment at which he might decide to do it, and the walk, his last walk, the birds fluttering overhead, flickering beyond his vision, unthinkingly noisy; one step after another. Free of a past that might constrain his right to die as he wished. Unlike the way her mother had died, forced to sip water, fed with a drip in the twilight glow of a hospital room. Her mother hated to be any trouble. Perhaps it was why she stopped eating and drinking.

Because someone had to do it for her. Susannah knew that would never happen to John. Looking after him and the children was her reason for existing. Why did she think it could be any different?

John didn't seem to know much about Irish other than the fact he was written in as a clause of the station's purchase agreement. No one was apparently allowed to get rid of him.

Although John reckoned he could kick him off if he wanted to. ‘What's he going to do, sue?' John added, laughing. Susannah looked forward to seeing the old man again. He didn't expect anything from her.

She wiped the lino tabletop, watching her hand move in a circular motion, leaving behind little droplets of water, satisfied by the way the dirty marks were being obliterated. The thought of being here indefinitely left her with a vague pain in the head.

It was as though her mind was overflowing with things that had to be folded away. There was plenty of medication she could take for it in the Flying Doctor medical chest. The heavy grey enamelled chest was kept under the bottom shelf in the pantry. Its key was on the top shelf among all the other keys she was responsible for, keys that opened the stores cupboard and the cool room where the beer was kept. Reading the literature, the chest open, she discovered five closely packed trays, apparently containing eighty-five items. She checked them off against a list and read the manual and worked out how to

Texas reach the Flying Doctor in an emergency. The possibilities for injury and death out on a station three hours from town seemed almost endless. She settled for a packet of paracetamol, taking two tablets with a glass of water. Rinsing her glass at the sink, she gazed out through the louvres and remembered that John had just asked whether she was happy. Why had it taken him so long?

In the afternoon she left the boys lining up Matchbox cars like a miniature traffic jam across the floorboards in the sleep-out while she connected the hoses to rusty sprinklers and moved them around the lawn between the trees. Overhead birds darted and dived from one branch to the next, one after another, screeching. She thought of what Ollie had just said. After they had woken from their nap, she had taken them across to the kitchen for a drink and something to eat. He had stopped on the path and looked up at the sky.

‘How high is the sky, Mummy?' he asked. ‘Like how many metres long is it?'

It reminded her of how she and a group of girls from boarding school had camped out in the paddock of a farm owned by the parents of one of her friends. They slept in sleeping bags around a mallee-root fire and imagined their lives. Looking up at the stars, the possibilities had seemed endless.

‘When I grow up,' Ollie said, ‘I'm going to be an astronaut. Mummy, what are you going to be when you grow up?'

It was too hard to keep up with the news of all her friends' activities, especially when she had nothing to tell. The spray from the sprinkler arced over the leaves and everything glittered.

Little birds with black-banded eyes dipped and trilled. She walked across the lawn to the storeroom after collecting the list of stores from the desk in the house. John had produced it last night. She would need to place another order for the second half of the year: all the groceries except perishables for the next six months. They'd come up by truck from Perth. She checked off what they already had. There were cans of food stacked on shelves that bent under their weight. Beans and corn and beetroot arranged at random, and then more cans in unopened boxes on the floor, along with drums of flour and large containers of tea and coffee and sugar and oil. A line of light shone where the walls met the floor, and the gap made her think of snakes. She looked up again and noticed the layer of dust and what may have been mouse droppings that covered everything: the tins of unrubbed tobacco, Rizzo papers and then, to her right, folded dusty jeans and hats and belt buckles that had lost their shine. There were more books like the ones she'd found in the house: cowboy stories for one dollar. The covers reminded her of the posters that advertised what was on at the drive-in in the town where she grew up. A shadow crossed the doorway. It was John. Perhaps she should talk to him, answer his question.

‘What are you doing?' she called as she stepped back into the light.

‘I've got jobs to do,' he said over his shoulder.

The children were running through the sprinkler.

Determined to stand
tall on the untamed
frontier

I

Laura learnt to ride on a tight rein, her horse circling an instructor in a small well-kept yard located on the edge of Greater London and on some maps it was probably considered to be in the county of Hertfordshire. The instructor repeated many times how Laura was to hold her hands, and what she was to do with her feet, toes pointed forwards, elbows close to her sides. When Laura accepted a job as a jillaroo soon after arriving in a small town in the far north of Western Australia, she wondered if the station horses would respond to the same commands.

She was driven out to the station sandwiched between the manager, who she had just met, and the new head stockman, a man surprisingly called Texas, and on the back of the same utility were two other men who were going to work as stockmen.

They passed through country that looked like the African landscape she'd seen as a child in a TV program called
Daktari,
and reached the station homestead after dark, the ute pulling up in front of a fence. A woman was standing beneath the light on the veranda. Laura was relieved to discover that she was not the only female. She hadn't expected the trip to take so long.

The silences between the men made it longer. Even though the woman at the hostel had known of John and the place he managed, there'd been too much time for ideas to creep into her mind and make her uneasy.

As the light had left the country they were driving through, it had begun to feel more foreign. Occasionally John, the manager, would ask Texas a question and when Texas replied he seemed to be laughing to himself, but even when she listened closely she couldn't hear anything funny about what he'd just said. John told Texas she was from England. Texas made a small noise in the back of his throat and looked out the window.

‘She can ride,' added John.

Texas glanced at her and back at the windscreen, a slight nod, and then she saw that he was grinning.

‘Maybe ride one of them buckjumpers eh?'

She smiled warily, unsure whether to laugh or not.

The woman under the light stepped forward to meet them.

Laura looked back at Texas; he was watching her and then he turned and followed the other two men. They seemed to know where to go because they vanished into the darkness. She stared after them. It was the first time she'd met an Australian Aboriginal.

After London, she'd expected every city to be a mix of people

Texas from different places and cultures, but in Perth, surprisingly, it hadn't been like that, not where she had stayed.

John was holding the door open. He nodded towards the woman. ‘My wife Susannah.'

Their eyes met, Susannah's resting on hers briefly before they flicked across to her husband.

‘Are the kids in bed?' he asked.

‘Yes,' Susannah croaked and cleared her voice, repeating ‘Yes', more loudly.

She seemed startled and it made Laura uncomfortable since obviously Susannah wasn't expecting her. Laura searched her memory for something similar, a reference point, but there wasn't one. Instead she became aware of the silence that seemed to exist beyond the boundaries of her own experience. Sounds emerged from it, scratchy and insignificant, the far-off engine, the footsteps of the woman across the veranda, her own shuffle that followed. It felt as though she'd dived into the gap between what she'd imagined a station in Australia to be like and the reality, and it was a bottomless drop. Susannah stopped in the doorway in front of Laura, glanced over her shoulder and then back at John who was still standing by the door.

‘Shouldn't she go with the others?' she said to him.

John stepped into the kitchen.

‘She can't go with the blokes. Cook's out bush. She can have that room that was the governess's.'

He dragged out a chair for himself and sat down.

‘Pull up a pew,' he nodded towards Laura. ‘You want a cup of tea?'

They sat in silence while Susannah poured water into a pot. Her back was blank, unreadable, and the sleeveless top she wore revealed arms that were slight yet muscular. There was a smell of cooked meat in the room and dishes lay neatly stacked on the sink. Although the place was clean, it looked old and shabby, more like a workers' cottage. Laura tried to catch the woman's eye when she turned around. Susannah seemed to relent a little, adjusting her features into a small tight smile.

John was talking.